Education Savings Accounts In Oklahoma

By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK

It is encouraging to see more and more state legislatures looking for ways to provide parents of parochial school students with some help in paying the tuition at the schools of their choice, especially when one keeps in mind that these parents pay taxes to support the public schools in their states. It indicates that the tide may be turning in our favor on this issue.
To avoid the question of the separation of church and state, whatever form of relief that is given to these parents — whether it be vouchers, tax credits, or education savings accounts — must be set up to ensure that the money goes to them and not directly to a church-related school. There is also the question of how to deal with the concerns of those who believe that any aid to children who will attend private and parochial schools will decrease the tax dollars available to the public schools their children attend.
Several states have found that education savings accounts (ESAs) are the best approach to deal with these objections. The website The Daily Signal recently interviewed Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin on why she backs ESAs in her state. Fallin is hoping that Oklahoma’s lawmakers are ready to establish ESAs this coming legislative session. She told The Daily Signal that five other states have already established ESAs and is hoping “Oklahoma will be the sixth.”
Oklahoma’s ESAs call for the state to redirect a portion of the funding spent on a child, who wishes to switch to a private school, a parochial school run by a religious organization, or a different public school in Oklahoma, into a separate account accessible only by his or her parents. (It must be stressed that only a portion of those tax dollars will be redirected; the remainder of the money will continue to go to the school the student is currently attending.) The redirected money can be spent only on the education of that child. The hope is that these redirected funds will permit children to pay the tuition at schools they could not otherwise afford to attend.
Fallin’s goal is to permit “every child” in Oklahoma to “decide on a choice of their school”; that the ESAs will give “parents an option” to “escape less performing schools”; that Oklahoma’s school children will not have their educational choices determined “on their zip codes.” She rejects the argument that it is “radical” to provide parents the “opportunity to choose the best education for their children,” and is convinced “public schools can coexist with alternative schools.”
As you would expect, there is opposition to Fallin’s proposal. Those who favor ESAs need to prepare themselves to answer the arguments that will be made against them.
I offer as an example Kurt Hochenauer, an English professor at the University of Central Oklahoma, who contends that Fallin’s plan “could financially devastate our public schools, and with the state facing major budget problems, now is exactly the wrong time to implement the system.” He objects that “the law could eventually transfer a large amount of taxpayer money to private and private-religious schools. He charges the proposals for ESAs contain an “unstated” agenda: “to privatize education and endorse Christianity.” He holds that the ESAs would “take away what little education money we have in Oklahoma and give it to wealthy, private schools or religious-indoctrination academies.”
Hochenauer goes on to make an argument that may appeal to some Oklahomans. He contends that many parents in the state live in rural areas that have few private and parochial schools available as an option for their children. Okay. But does that not mean — if I have read Gov. Fallin’s proposal correctly — that few children will be withdrawn from the schools in that area, and more important, that they will have few funds withdrawn from their public school systems?
Remember, with the ESAs, the funds are redirected from a school only when a child switches to another school. If there are few alternative schools for children to switch to in the rural areas that Hochenauer describes, there will be little switching of schools and little redirected money. It strikes me that Hochenauer is seeking to stir up resentment by creating a false scenario of poor, country kids suffering when money is taken from their school to help rich, Catholic school kids.
Hochenauer continues: The ESAs “would probably just wind up in the end mostly helping parents who already send their children to private schools, such as Mount St. Mary Catholic High School and Bishop McGuinness Catholic High School.” Hochenauer may be revealing more than he intended: that his objections to ESAs is rooted in the prospect of parents who send their children to Catholic schools getting more financial aid than parents with other religious affiliations.
Catholics might as well face the fact that this resentment is a significant part of the opposition to any tax relief for parents whose children do not attend local public schools. We should also face that it is not an entirely unreasonable objection for non-Catholics to harbor. People are people. We don’t like to see someone else getting a bigger share of taxpayer funds than we get. Anti-Catholicism may have less to do with these objections from our non-Catholic neighbors as much as their perception that there is something unfair about one religion profiting more from a government program than others.
Consider how few complaints there are from the American public when students at Notre Dame or Georgetown get public assistance in the form of Pell Grants and federally subsidized student loans. It seems clear to me that the explanation is that far more students at state and secular private colleges — as well as colleges connected to Protestant churches such as Southern Methodist University and Southern Baptist University, along with various Yeshivas — get assistance than students at Catholic colleges.
I am convinced that if there were an extensive network of Protestant and Jewish elementary and high schools receiving help in the form of ESAs and vouchers, there would be far fewer complaints such as those from Professor Hochenauer. Unfortunately, there is little to be done in the foreseeable future to remedy that situation.
There is another angle to this question. First Teachers would like to hear from our readers regarding it. Once these ESAs are established, won’t it permit students to use them at schools that Catholics find less than commendable? I am thinking of schools run by Muslim organizations, Protestant fundamentalists with a hostility toward Catholics, Wiccans, groups such as the Black Panthers, and so on. Is this something we have to live with? If not, what guidelines can be established to prevent it from happening?

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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford CT 06492.